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Grants That Make a Difference
"Grants that Make a Difference" highlights grants given to Southeastern organizations that have helped make a difference in people's lives. Getting the grant is only the beginning of the story. At least once a month, "Grants That Make a Difference" will profile these important grants and what their recipients are doing with them.
The Ford Foundation awarded a three-year, $300,000 grant to the Women’s Research and Resource Center at Spelman College
this year to internationalize its curriculum with a focus on Africa and the African Diaspora. The Foundation Center-Atlanta
interviewed Dr. Beverly Guy-Sheftall, the Center’s director, about the project, called “Globalizing African Diasporan
Women’s Studies”.
FC: Please tell us some details about this project.
BG: This continues earlier work we have done. We have had a number of grants from the Ford Foundation for
curriculum development in women’s studies, one of which infused issues of race and gender in the science curriculum and
culminated in an international meeting on HIV and AIDS among African Diasporan women.
This new grant will further internationalize Spelman’s curriculum and will focus on gender issues in the African
Diaspora and Africa. It will infuse global issues into our department’s courses as well as other departments, primarily
humanities and social science.
It will broaden global linkages previously formed in other projects by involving our department with gender institutes
and universities outside of the U.S., especially in Africa and the Caribbean, that are dealing with gender issues.
It also includes faculty development activities at Spelman. For example, we will invite faculty from other countries to
attend seminars; one already scheduled is Global Black Feminism. It will also include summer faculty exchanges with the
African Gender Institute in Capetown; a working paper series; even perhaps a two-week student exchange with the University
of West Indies and possibly others.
Thematic areas are global women’s health issues, a continuation of our work on HIV and AIDS; African feminism, in which
the research can affect not only our courses on feminist theory but thinking in general about feminism in the African
Diaspora; and social activism. One interest of our Associate Director, Dr. M. Bahati Kuumba, is gender and social
resistance movements, and we wish to globalize the content of the course to an even greater extent.
FC: What is the Center’s mission and how does it relate to the project?
BG: This program is very much in line with the Center’s mission of curriculum development in women’s studies,
community outreach, and research on women of African descent.
The program would further refine the women’s studies major. One of our department’s goals is to increase the number of
women’s studies majors who go on to get their doctorate degrees. Community outreach is also important, but now it is mostly
based in the U.S. This would enable us to expand outreach to Africa and the Caribbean. Research about women of African
descent through the working paper series would contribute to the general scholarship in African Diasporan women’s studies.
FC: Who are the beneficiaries, and what is the community impact?
BG: This benefits the students and faculty of the college in the sense that it globalizes the curriculum, which
is a major objective at Spelman. That is the local impact. The involvement outside of the U.S. will help all the
institutions to think of ways to strengthen their gender studies programs. It will also impact and strengthen women’s studies
in the U.S. overall.
FC: Thank you for talking with us about your program, Dr. Sheftall.
Recipient Contact Information:
Recipient Name: Spelman College
Address: 350 Spelman Lane, Box 115
Atlanta, GA 30314
Phone: 404-270-5625
FAX: 404-270-5980
Contact: Dr. Beverly Guy-Sheftall, Director
Women’s Research and Resource Center
Email: bsheftal@spelman.edu
URL: www.ncrw.org/digest/spelman.htm
Grantmaker Contact Information:
Grantmaker Name: The Ford Foundation
Year Founded: 1936
Address:320 East 43rd Street
New York, NY 10017
Phone: 212-573-5000
FAX: 212-351-3677
URL: www.fordfound.org
The selection of organizations for the "Grants that Make a Difference" is based on criteria such as programmatic interests, geographic focus, and size of funding programs to ensure the broadest possible representation of the region's nonprofit sector.
If you'd like to see support for your organization featured in "Grants that Make a Difference," e-mail a detailed description of the grant, including the name and contact information of the funder and of your organization, the amount given, and how the grant made a difference. For your convenience, we have provided a template to follow. We welcome press releases in addition to, or as a substitute for, the information in the template.
Email the description or press release to
atweb@foundationcenter.org, with "Grants that Make a Difference" in the subject line.
Recipient Name:
Project Name:
Organization Mission and how it relates to the project:
Beneficiaries or Community Impact:
Funding Partner(s): (Grantmaker Names)
Grant Amount:
Recipient Contact: Name, Address, Phone, Fax, E-mail, URL
Grantmaker Contact: Name, Address, Phone, Fax, E-mail, URL
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